01 August 2012

Just Another Day at the Saloon

I was in Jinja the other day to meet
some friends and important people in their lives that I'd not met
yet. I wanted to look my best, naturally. Since I'd been out of water
for several days and had literally no clean clothes, I decided the
only way to look somewhat presentable was with a haircut and, since
my beard trimmer broke several months ago and my beard was reaching
near-Amish lengths, a shave.

I got the 4:30am bus that comes through
town, hoping that the work that had been done on the Mbale-Soroti
highway over the past few weeks – filling in potholes, flattening,
paving: it's now more or less filled in and flattened all the way up
to Kumi and paved about halfway up, which made the worst highway in
Uganda, by far, slightly less worst – would make for a smoother
ride and more sleep. It didn't. But at least they weren't blasting
traditional Ugandan music, like last time I'd taken the early bus. I
was able to catch a few minutes of sleep once we got out of Mbale and
hit solid tarmac, and the bus got me to Jinja around 8:45, plenty of
day left to clean myself up. So I checked into a hotel – The
Crystal Palace, which sounds like it's named after a David Bowie
movie, and is not as fancy as it sounds – and headed out to find a
barber.

I walked past a few signs for, as they
call them here, saloons, but they all pointed down alleys off the
street, and I thought I could do better. After about ten minutes of
walking, I realized that no, I probably couldn't. I passed another
sign pointing down another alleyway and decided that was the one: A
large mural of a barber giving a haircut was on the outside wall;
they'd at least put that much effort into their shop, so they must be
at least that much committed to their craft.

They didn't seem surprised to see a
muzungu walk into their shop at nine in the morning, which I took to
be a good sign, and both barbers were hard at work on haircuts
already, which I took to be another good sign. The fact that they
were both hard at work on Ugandan guys was beside the point.

When one of the barbers finished and
his barbee – what's the word for the one getting a haircut? –
paid, he went to slap me on the knee, sort of missed and slapped my
inner thigh instead, was unfazed by the contact his hand had just
made with my inner leg – “Yes, big man! How are you?” – gave
me an enthusiastic high-five/handshake and told me I was next.

I sat down in the chair and explained
what I wanted him to do – don't cut the top at all, just buzz the
back and the sides – feeling confident because how hard could that
be?

Very hard, apparently, and what
followed was the strangest haircut experience I've ever had.

(Despite the fact that I once got an
accidental and terrible buzzcut at a random barber shop, they usually
do a pretty good job, and so I keep going back, rather than waiting
til I'm in Kampala and paying 10x the price for someone who I know
knows how to cut my hair.)

He began with fire. That's not a
metaphor for his enthusiasm. He actually lit a small fire on the wood
counter. “Some people don't do this,” he told me, as he held the
clippers over the fire to sanitize them. “You don't say,” I said,
my confidence going up in flames. After that, it quickly became
obvious I was his first muzungu haircut.

He started to go at my head with the
newly sanitized clippers, and with difficulty. He was going down,
with the direction of my hair, and the effect was not what he seemed
to hope it would be: In that direction, he literally wasn't cutting
any of my hair. Discouraged, he grabbed a pair of scissors instead.
My confidence came back a little bit: Usually these places don't even
have scissors, let alone know
how to use them.

He
sized up the back of my head for a minute and then went at it with
the scissors. However, instead of, as barbers do when they know how
to cut white hair, holding a bit of hair between his fingers on one
hand to measure it out while cutting with the scissors in the other
hand, he just went for it – free-style, free-hand.

After
two sizable cuts, I decided that was not going to end well – a
couple weeks ago, we had given Nick a haircut and had quickly found
out how hard it is to give good haircuts with scissors – and told
him so before he could do any serious damage. “I think maybe the
clippers will be better,” I said. He didn't miss a beat – how
many chunks had he already taken out of my head? – before readily
agreeing, “Yes, I think so,” and putting the scissors away.

The
next thirty minutes: he figured out that going up with the clippers
was better than going down; he still went down with them the majority
of the time; he marveled at the fact – “So you will see a white
man cutting hair??” – that we had barbers in America; he told me
that, since I was from the United States, I was a son of Obama, and
that since I was living in Uganda, I was also a son of Museveni; he
marveled at the texture of my hair – “Eh! Your hair is
smoooooth!” – and I decided not to tell him that it was because
I'd been out of water for a few days and it was just greasy; at one
point, he spent a good thirty seconds going over my face with the
clippers, underneath my eyes, where there isn't any hair; a large
Muslim man walked into the shop, removed his shirt, and left again
(Ramadan fasting going to his head, possibly); and it became rather
clear that, in his admirable attempt not to do a really terrible job
on my hair, he just wasn't going to cut very much off so I told him
that it looked fine and we gave up and moved on to the beard; this
presented him with an even greater level of difficulty; there was a
lot of baby powder involved; I spent a good two minutes trying to
convince him to literally just shave it all off; then I just took the
clippers and did it myself; finished, there were then four different
types of lotion rubbed all over my face, and a good five minutes of
face-massaging; then he asked me if I knew Nick, and I briefly
wondered if this whole thing wasn't some kind of payback for the
hack-job we'd done on his hair the week before, impressed with his
planning and how he knew that I'd go into that particular shop at
that time (giving him more credit than he was due: You just can't
plan these sorts of experiences; he had no idea who I was talking
about... allegedly).

Finally,
I was able to extricate myself from the chair and his lotion-covered
hands, paid and thanked him for his time, realized that we'd had an
audience of four women and two men for the entire experience, waved
at them, and left, my hair looking almost exactly the same as it had
when I'd walked in an hour earlier. At least I got my beard trimmed.

All of
that brings me to this: We had our Close of Service Conference a few
weeks ago, and I officially end my Peace Corps service on September
20. Two years has flown by – “Someone was playing with the
clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but with the wind-up
kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year
would pass, and then it would twitch again.” Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five –
and now with only seven weeks left, I've started to realize some of
the random little things that I'll miss about living in Uganda.

Thing
I'll Miss About Living In Uganda #134: The kinds of experiences you
only get when you get your hair cut in a random back-alley saloon.

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